Allow me to join the ranting. (Will also delete if OP so desires. Or just make my own post.)
Flagrant stupidity?! I…what?! Someone please explain to me how the character established in Thor (2011)/Avengers (2012)/TDW was flagrantly stupid, because I just don’t see it.
In Thor (2011) he was the only one of Thor’s gang who realized that going to Jotunheim was going to get them all killed and actually did something about it. He basically predicted that Heimdall was going to betray him ahead of time (he’s literally standing on some sort of balcony watching while the Bifrost fires up for Sif & the W3). He figured out how to finish the job Odin and Thor started on Jotunheim without loss of Asgardian life (obviously still messed up, but it’s there).
In Avengers (2012) he learned what the Avengers were before some of the Avengers even knew, and he managed to specifically tailor attacks for each Avenger based on that information. (Speech making in Germany for Cap, killing Coulson and using the Hulk-cell for Thor, the whole interrogation with Nat…it’s pretty consistent.)
In TDW he cooked up a plan after getting stabbed through the chest that involved going back to Asgard without being seen, overpowering freaking ODIN, and acting in Odin’s place well enough that even Thor couldn’t telll. (Not that Thor’s the most observant of people, but still.) And he pulled it all off. He then played Odin so well that nobody on Asgard knew after four years.
I…I don’t see the flagrant stupidity here.
It’s only Ragnarok/IW that make him stupid, what with suddenly forgetting how to act as Odin/laziness in protecting the Nine Realms/not preparing for Thanos/ trying to kill Thanos with a letter opener/ etc. Even Endgame, from what I’ve heard, allows him to use his brain enough to make an escape with the Tesseract.
Next up—“inability to read this enemy as something worthy of more than Loki’s usual parlor tricks.”
That’s two separate issues here. I’ll start with “inability to read this enemy (as more dangerous)”.
Loki already knows Thanos! He knew him for at least a year! He was getting tortured by Thanos and co for at least a year. (I’ve heard it argued that the wormhole Loki fell into would create a temporal anomaly. This is really not my area of expertise, but Ragnarok actually backs this up with “a wormhole in space and time”. Though the quote’s from when he was joking about his suicide attempt, I actually like the idea.) Loki knows exactly what Thanos is capable of, more so than any other Phase One character.
The other issue with the “inability…[…]…more than Loki’s usual parlor tricks” quote is that what Loki usually uses are more than parlor tricks.
Thor (2011)? He fights Jotnar with daggers and illusions. He gets from Asgard to Earth and back with no one the wiser—no one seems to be aware that he did it except Thor, who he specifically came to talk to. He freezes Heimdall into an ice-block when Heimdall tries to decapitate him. He fights Thor with Gungnir and illusions. No parlor tricks yet.
Avengers (2012)? He activates the Tesseract from the other side of the universe to portal into the SHIELD base. He takes out several agents who are/were firing machine guns at him in a matter of seconds. He fights Captain America and wins. He has his henchmen take down a Helicarrier turbine or two (don’t remember). He unleashes the Hulk. He fights Thor. Also there’s mind-control and attempted mind-control. Still no parlor tricks.
TDW? Admittedly he doesn’t get to do much of anything for a while, because he’s either chained and collared or stuck in a bright white prison cell. After that, he steers a skiff into a gap in a cliff barely big enough to fit it. He takes out a squad of Dark Elves with a knife or two. He stabs Kursed through the chest, and then, while impaled himself, activates an implosion device on Kursed’s belt. He then wakes up after said impalement and overpowers Odin shortly afterwards. I’m still not seeing any parlor tricks.
Yeah…no. His reaction to Odin’s cruelty is less shock (at never having seen it before and not knowing where it suddenly came from) and more ‘I know exactly what you are but I still didn’t expect you to stoop this low’. In the end of Thor (2011) any naïveté present in him is destroyed, when he realizes that it really doesn’t matter what he does. And I wouldn’t call the one person who sees everyone’s BS for what it is and calls them out on it “naive.” Next.
“…save his younger brother one last time.”
Well, there’s that one moment in TDW where Loki’s getting sucked into that implosion bomb thing (or whatever it’s called, idk) and Thor grabs him out, but that’s literally all I can think of just now. It’s the only point where Thor successfully saves Loki (even if it only lasts for a few minutes, when Loki saves Thor and gets a sword through the chest for it). Other than that: he tries to save Loki when they’re falling off the Bifrost, but…that doesn’t really work, since Odin had to catch him, and then Odin said “no, Loki,” which resulted in Loki attempting suicide. So, not a save. (Though you could argue that he tried to save that illusion of Loki that was hanging off the edge when they were fighting on the Bifrost.)
Actually, Loki’s…kind of more prone to saving Thor successfully, since he does it in Thor (2011) by calling Odin to come after them on Jotunheim, then in TDW when he saves Thor from Kursed, and again in IW.
